Books, Glorious Books!

My friend and KidsOutAndAbout publisher, Deb, has written a book! It’s Seasons and Reasons: A Parent’s Guide to Cultivating Great Kids, and actually, if you’re already signed up for the newsletter, some of it will look familiar. It’s a collection of her publisher’s notes, with all sorts of brief, thoughtful essays on parenting that will motivate you to be a better parent without irritating you. If you’re a Kindle person, click the link above because it’s FREE on Kindle until Monday. We LOVE free!

Of course, if you like to hold a good, old-fashioned book, you can also buy the paperback.

In fact, if you’re thinking of buying the paperback, you should click on the picture, because I’m doing the Amazon Affiliates thing as a little experiment. That means that if you click from my blog over to Amazon and buy what I recommended, I get a teensy cut of the money you spend. I’m not expecting to get much money, really, but it’s easy to do, and it gives you a cute little image, so what the heck? I actually tried this before, a long while back, and almost immediately, some creeper tried to buy an Amazon UK gift card with my account information, so I got spooked and ditched it before putting it into effect. This happened twice, which made me cast the whole project aside for a long time, but I’ve been meaning to try it again. This time, we look okay so far (knock on wood!).

As long as I’m suggesting books, I’ve been meaning to share a couple of parenting books that I’ve found helpful lately. I read a ridiculous number of books when I was pregnant and a parent of babies and toddlers, and then it dropped off. Basically, it seemed like things were going pretty well (I’m knocking on wood again!), so the urgency wasn’t there. Also, many of the books I read early on had a very specific viewpoint, and it made me feel a little bit like if I didn’t follow the advice, I was going to Ruin My Children. So I started coasting on instinct.

But in the last year or two I’ve had a couple of. . . challenges that sent me back to books.

I loved I’d Listen to My Parents If They’d Just Shut Up: What to Say and Not Say When Parenting Teens, by Anthony Wolf, PhD. Funny title, right? He is, I kid you not, also author of Get Out of My Life, but First Could You Drive Me & Cheryl to the Mall. Bwah, ha, ha.

This book was recommended by a friend who had an older child, and I found it tremendously reassuring. Wolf starts by talking about being a parent of a kid whom everyone tells you is awesome, but who can be tremendously obnoxious in the privacy of your own home. Which leads you to wonder if everything’s going great, like the general public thinks, or if you’re in fact failing miserably at this parenting gig. I totally identified with that. Then he says that if my kid appears to be a model citizen out of our presence, chances are good that everything will work out great. Phew! I also found it entertaining that, in his little vignettes of conversations with teenagers, the kids were so unbelievably horrifying, so unbelievably snotty, that I automatically felt better about my own kids. But then there were practical tips that I felt that Cute W must read, and I put little stickies in the book. By the time I was done, it looked like this:

So, that’s absolutely helpful, and even though it says it’s for teenagers, if your child is Gifted In The Obnoxious Arts, I think some pieces of the advice could be helpful beginning at, say, eleven years old.

Meanwhile, my other child inspired me to find Letting Go of Perfect: Overcoming Perfectionism in Kids, by Hope Wilson, PhD. and Jill Adelson, PhD. It had never occurred to me that there would be an entire book devoted to the problems of perfectionism, so finding this was a relief. They offer up specific suggestions on how to make your child’s perfectionism a force of Good instead of Evil.

And finally, probably my my very favorite parenting advice book, Ellyn Satter’s book Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense. It’s the only book in which I feel like the advice absolutely made a difference and helped my kids to “turn out” better.  You know:  so far.   And I found this book reassuring, non-stress-inducing, and effective.

And, as long as we’re talking about books I recommend, I started a list of Favorite Books under the little Favorites link at the top of the page. I might add more, but for now, here’s one of my all-time favorite lists, Girl Power Picture Books, as well as some of My Favorite Books, either ones that I’ve read recently and loved or ones that I rated five stars on Good Reads.

So, shop away! And, even if you don’t want to do me a solid and spend money for me, you can nab the free Kindle book, which will translate into amping up Deb’s Amazon rating. And tell me what books I simply must read, too, please.